Ad description
A product page on the Sports Direct website, www.sportsdirect.com, seen on 10 February 2026 for the Puma “Women’s Zipped Baselayer Top”. The ad featured the text “from £17.00 RRP £45.00 [struck through]”. Further text underneath the price stated “UP TO 50% OFF”.
Issue
Which? Ltd, the consumer protection group, who believed that the quoted RRP differed significantly from the price at which the product was generally sold, challenged whether the reference price and associated savings claims were misleading.
Response
Fraser’s Group Trading Ltd t/a Sports Direct said they had obtained written confirmation from Puma that the RRP for the “Women’s Zipped Baselayer Top” featured in the ad had always been £45. Puma had also confirmed that the product was sold by them for £45 from at least 1 February 2023 to 22 April 2024. They provided screenshots of parts of Puma’s price list for Spring/Summer 2024 to Spring/Summer 2026, which they said showed the RRP for the product had not changed. They also provided a screenshot of the current Puma website showing the product being sold at £45, as well as a screenshot from a third-party retailer showing the product being sold for £43.94.
Sports Direct believed that both the RRP and discounted price seen in the ad were fair and accurate. They said their business approach was to reduce the prices of products to the cheapest possible for UK consumers. Sports Direct considered there was no detriment to consumers because by offering consumers the lowest prices, they could not get a better price anywhere else.
Sports Direct said the use of RRPs in the ad reflected the average consumer’s understanding of that term in the UK, particularly in the sporting goods sector, and that their customers understood the nature of the use of RRPs on their website. They said that consumers understood an RRP to be a recommendation of a product’s retail value, reflecting a subjective view of what the product was worth and the price at which they could reasonably expect to buy it. In using an RRP, a retailer was not making a claim that it had sold the product at the RRP itself; it was simply a recommendation of the retail value of the product. Sports Direct therefore believed the ad did not mislead consumers or lead them to make a transactional decision that they would not otherwise have taken. They highlighted that no consumer had complained directly about the ad.
Assessment
Upheld
The CAP Code stated that price comparisons must not mislead by falsely claiming a price advantage. Comparisons with recommended retail prices (RRPs) were likely to mislead if the RRP differed significantly from the price at which the product or service was generally sold. CAP guidance on RRPs stated that, even if an advertiser could provide evidence that a quoted RRP was recommended by the manufacturer, that may be insufficient if they could not demonstrate the product was actually sold at that price.
We considered that consumers would understand the stated RRP to be the price recommended by the manufacturer and at which the product was generally sold across the market. Consumers would therefore expect the RRP to be a genuine selling price and to be able to make a saving against that price. That expectation would be reinforced by the claim “UP TO 50% OFF”. As such, we expected to see evidence to demonstrate that, at the time the ad was seen, the product was available from other retailers at the RRP stated, to demonstrate that the RRP quoted in the ad was reflective of the price at which the product was generally sold.
Sports Direct provided screenshots from the manufacturer’s price list to show that the RRP had been set at £45 by Puma, and had not changed since the ‘Spring/Summer 2024’ timeframe. They also provided one screenshot of the product being sold for £45 on the Puma website. However, we considered that RRPs set by the manufacturer did not constitute evidence that this was the price at which the product was generally sold across the market. We also noted that the colour of the product sold by Sports Direct was not available on the Puma website. We had seen evidence that, as well as being sold for £17 on the Sports Direct website, the product was being sold for £17 by another large online and high-street retailer owned by Frasers Group, and for £23 by an online sporting goods store. Those prices appeared to undermine the claim that the product was generally sold at the quoted RRP. Sports Direct also provided one screenshot of the product being sold by a third-party seller on a large e-commerce website for £43.94, which was closer to the RRP. We noted the third-party seller appeared to be a small business who did not have their own website, sold products only through third-party e-commerce sites, and had only one of the advertised product left in stock. Overall, we considered the evidence suggested the stated RRP was not the price at which the product was generally sold across the market, and that the RRP and associated savings claim were not genuine.
Because we considered the evidence provided was insufficient, we concluded that the quoted RRP and associated savings claim for the advertised product were misleading.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 (Misleading advertising), 3.17 (Prices) and 3.39 (Price comparisons).
Action
The ad must not appear again in the form complained of. We told Frasers Group Trading Ltd t/a Sports Direct to ensure that future price comparisons did not mislead by falsely claiming a price advantage, and that references to RRPs reflected the price at which the product concerned was generally sold across the market.
